Moral and political dilemmas

Robert Gore-Langton talks to Ronald Harwood about musical life in Nazi Germany

Nazis in the theatre liven things up no end. They provide the hilarity in The Producers, the creepiness in Cabaret. And when you can’t take any more bright copper kettles or warm woollen mittens in The Sound of Music on comes the SS, arguably the best moment in the show. Now there’s a new play about music in Nazi Germany, a sobering reminder of just how seriously the Third Reich took its music and music-makers. Collaboration is about Richard Strauss and his relationship with the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who together wrote an opera in the 1930s while the storm was gathering over Europe. The play is by the Oscar-winning screenwriter and playwright Ronald Harwood and is at Chichester Festival Theatre in a companion piece with Taking Sides, his 1995 hit about the post-war American ‘denazification’ trial of the famous conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who was eventually cleared of having served the Nazi regime.

The elderly Strauss — a national figure — was certainly a very big catch for Hitler. These days musical plebs (like me) tend to think of Strauss not as the composer of Der Rosenkavalier and Salome, but as the guy who did the intro music to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Elvis used the same music — from ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ — during his Las Vegas period.

Strauss died in 1949, his reputation tarnished by having written cheap swastika music for the regime. The other character in the play is Stefan Zweig (to be played by the superb David Horovitch), who was a best-selling author in the Thirties and one of Europe’s most deeply cultured intellectuals. He got out of Austria in time, fled to England, briefly lived on Lyncombe Hill in Bath, before finally ending up in Brazil where he and his young wife, homesick and utterly despairing, jointly committed suicide in 1942.

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